Hearst Foundations award $100,000 grant to SciCom Program
May 02, 2011
The Hearst Foundations, founded in the 1940s by William Randolph Hearst, have granted $100,000 to the Science Communication Program at UC Santa Cruz to support the program's corps of professional instructors.
The funds will allow the director and lecturers to recruit new guest speakers and journalists in residence to consult with each year's class of ten graduate students. The grant was awarded for a three-year period, starting with the 2011-12 academic year.
A portion of the funds also will help offset salaries for the program's lecturers, all of whom are working journalists and editors from the San Francisco Bay Area. Each lecturer teaches a course in his or her specialty, giving the students an intensely practical exposure to many modes of science journalism—from news and features to investigative reporting and multimedia.
The gift from the Hearst Foundations will lead to deeper and broader connections with the professional science journalism community for SciCom students during their nine months of instruction. Some of the new Hearst-funded visitors will stay for one to two weeks, teaching seminars and meeting with students privately about their substantive projects.
The program will create an advisory board to evaluate the new Hearst-funded initiatives each year.
The Hearst Foundations are national philanthropic resources for organizations and institutions in the fields of education, health, culture, and social service. Their goal is to ensure that people of all backgrounds have the opportunity to build healthy, productive and inspiring lives.
The charitable goals of the Foundations reflect the philanthropic interests of publisher and philanthropist William Randolph Hearst, who founded the Hearst Foundation, Inc. in 1945. In 1948, Mr. Hearst established the California Charities Foundation, renamed the William Randolph Hearst Foundation in 1951. The two Foundations are managed as one entity, sharing the same funding guidelines, leadership, and staff based in New York and San Francisco.
In addition, the Foundation administers two operating programs, the United States Senate Youth Program and the Hearst Journalism Awards program.
